In 2006 I made optoisolator cards for the cnc-mill project, but now with the lathe I am using servo-drives and a VFD which mostly already have optoisolated inputs, so I will use these very simple breakout boards instead. There are two pitch-standards for the screw-terminals, an imperial one with a pitch of 5.08 mm (i.e. [...]
I put together this small computer which will be used to control the lathe. The components for this kind of box are quite inexpensive: D945GCLF2 motherboard including 1.6 GHz Atom330 CPU, 76 eur Codegen MX31 case including 420W PSU, 46 eur 2Gb DDR2 memory stick, 46eur Samsung 320Gb HDD, 44eur Labtec keyaboard + mouse, 17eur [...]
This PCI-card with an FPGA and 72 I/O lines will be used to control the lathe. $199 from Mesa electronics
By popular demand, a schematic which roughly shows the electrical connections of our cnc-mill setup. Most of it fits inside one box (also shown here). The m5i20 I/O connectors are on the left, followed by the optoisolator cards. E-stop chain in the middle, servo-amplifiers and motors to the right. Jog wheel at the bottom. The small [...]
The people at EMC2 Fest (webcam here) made this AVI of 5-axis machining a sphere using some custom g-code and povray. I’ve been playing around with vpython, so you can expect some CAM-related posts on drop-cutter in Python and associated 3D views or animations in the not too distant future.
Here’s a setup wit three vises for machining model yacht tiller arms. The parts are rotated 90 degrees between the first stage (leftmost) and the second stage (middle), and then again 90 degrees for the final stage (right). There’s some rigid tapping at around 8:20.
We’ve mounted a 500 cpr encoder on the spindle-motor which means it’s possible to do rigid tapping. Above some spot-drilling, then a 2.5 mm drill, and then an M3 tap at 500 RPM and 0.5 mm Z-feed per revolution. Below the same thing but with a 5 mm drill and an M6 tap (1 mm [...]
As promised, the video of the roughing + finish operation on the finderscope-ring drilling jig.
Last weekend we made some rings for mounting a finderscope on the main telescope. Today I got the holes drilled and tapped so the rings are ready to use. The gallery below shows the adaptive pocketing paths that were used to cut both the part and the jig that allowed drilling the holes at +/- [...]
Jari shot some videos during the milling of the beaver-tail bulb. They now appear on YouTube. For a mostly home-built cnc minimill of this size, this is pretty ‘hard core’ stuff…